Risk Detection Software

How do you identify risk in risk management?

Identifying risk involves determining where exactly risks lie within your environment. For instance, it often involves making sure there’s no illegal or risky software downloaded to any of the devices in your business. That’s why one of the main elements of the risk identification process is monitoring your technology assets over time, including laptops, servers, and other devices.

One common risk is when employees download content to their devices without IT authorization. These activities may seem harmless, but they can create risk in the organization, which means employee devices need to be monitored constantly. Another risk is if employees forget to install a security software update.

If you are trying to identify risks manually, the monitoring process can involve literally walking around to inspect your employees’ machines to make sure they’re complying with software licenses and not downloading materials off the internet that might expose the organization to threats.

Obviously, manual risk identification is both time-consuming and fairly unrealistic. If you work in IT, there’s no way you can constantly watch over your employees to make sure they avoid risks associated with the IT infrastructure they’re using.

Most risk management strategies implement automatic risk detection using risk management software. These tools automatically scan your network to identify and assess risks. They then inform you of their identified risks, so you can act to reduce their potential impact.

What are the steps in risk management?

The risk management process consists of the initial assessment, mitigation, and the final evaluation and assessment. Each of these steps is integral to the process, whether you’re dealing with regular risk management or IT risk management specifically.

It’s helpful to first review the purpose of IT risk management. In IT, risk is calculated by multiplying the value of an asset, the vulnerability of the system to that risk, and the degree of threat the risk poses to the organization. IT risk management helps you manage the risks tied to the implementation and use of IT as part of a larger business operation.

Common steps to take for IT risk management are:

1. Assessment. First, you need to identify when and where a risk might arise. You then need to analyze the risk and determine its size and potential impact, thinking concretely about how it will impact different aspects of your organization and systems. Once you’ve evaluated all your risks, you need to rank them to determine which risks to prioritize. This involves thinking both about the potential impact of the risk and the likelihood of it occurring. 
2. Mitigation. Put countermeasures in place to reduce the impact of the specific risks you identified and assessed during the first step. 
3. Evaluation and Assessment. As you act on a risk you need to constantly track and monitor your efforts. Once you have finished acting on a particular risk, you can then evaluate and assess your efforts at mitigating the risk. You can use the results of your evaluation to determine what actions you should take moving forward and if you should change or keep up with your current plans for risk management. 

What is the risk management implementation process?

Using cloud software to implement risk management can be a convenient solution - implementing it doesn’t require specific hardware or physical storage space. However, risk management requires a strategy for identifying and addressing risky assets. The steps in implementing an effective risk management system include:

1. Asset discovery: Risk management begins with asset discovery, which requires your service desk to record a comprehensive catalog of your IT infrastructure. Manual spreadsheets can quickly become long and unmanageable, and manual discovery can introduce human error. Integrating your risk management software with automated discovery technology allows you to scan your IP-discoverable assets regularly and discover new changes when they occur.
2. Asset management: In the context of risk management, asset management allows you to identify the assets posing chronic challenges, and home in on problem assets to help prevent security vulnerabilities. To manage IT assets, you’ll need to constantly connect your service desk operations with your IT infrastructure database. Understanding root causes requires you to align each incident and problem ticket with the asset involved. As you continue to link assets to tickets, you can increase the speed and accuracy with which you address employees’ issues. Outside of risk management, other components of asset management include implementing standard antivirus protections, firewalls, and other types of anti-malware software.
3. Asset monitoring: Automated asset monitoring allows you to gauge the efficacy of your asset management by constantly scanning your discoverable IT infrastructure. Alerting capabilities helps ensure security vulnerabilities discovered during a scan can be communicated via email or SMS for rapid response.
4. Resolution and evaluation: The final step in the risk management process is to resolve your vulnerabilities and to evaluate the success of your workaround. ITIL guidelines state your service desk should address issues with a workaround that’s as efficient as possible, while remaining as effective as possible. After you’ve implemented your workaround, you can continue to monitor the progress of your problem device using your asset management and monitoring procedures.

Risk management aims to help prevent security breaches, and to operate with maximum efficiency while doing so. With a standard implementation procedure, your service desk management team can address vulnerabilities in a reliable, streamlined manner.

With Service Desk, you can also maximize the risk management process by integrating with the broader SolarWinds^® Orion^® Platform. By integrating with other products, you can speed up IT response to critical events across your IT infrastructure, and better understand how your service management processes impact assets and dependencies. View risk information in a centralized location for more context.

Why does an organization need risk management?

Risk management software offers a wide range of services designed to help businesses save money and time and improve their overall security. Major benefits of risk management software include:

• Asset tracking: With regular asset scans, risk management software can assess the licensing of each item in your inventory. Automated tracking allows you to identify assets near the end of their life cycle and renew licenses before they become obsolete. Compliance tools help you avoid downtime due to expired licenses and can help save money as a result.
• Avoiding data breaches: Data breaches aren’t just a major inconvenience—they’re extremely costly. Data breaches involve immediate costs to your business—like stolen money and unproductive downtime—and long-term damage to your reputation. By minimizing the chance of a data breach, risk management software can be a stellar business investment in the long run.
• Improving customer service: Risk management software helps you to streamline your ticketing and incident resolution process, with information gathered from regular risk scans. Risk detection helps you quickly identify the root cause of issues and resolve employees’ issues.

A comprehensive security management system should include a preemptive approach to risk management, in addition to more traditional threat detection software and troubleshooting tools. Risk management allows you to understand problem spots in your IT infrastructure, so your business can operate with as few IT hang-ups as possible.

What is risk management software?

Risk management software solutions, like those included within SolarWinds Service Desk, identify and assess risk for you. The process of identifying risk is tedious, time-consuming, and repetitive. A risk assessment tool does the work for you, automatically identifying risks and alerting you as soon as a risk demands your attention.

With the large amount of technology associated with your organization, security threats can come at you from many different angles. SolarWinds Service Desk risk detection enables you to automate notifications for potential risks that can cause issues for your company and your employees, so you can better ensure risks aren’t slipping under your radar and harming your organization.

When it comes to risk management, communication is key, and risk management software like Service Desk is useful. Once Service Desk identifies an incident, it’s easy to escalate and resolve the issue while maintaining complete transparency and communication with everyone impacted by the risk.

Why is IT risk detection critical for a service desk?

Risk detection forms an integral part of a good ITIL service desk by providing a way to identify and then address security risks before they become immediate threats. But aside from helping to prevent security breaches, there are plenty of ways in which IT risk detection can assist your service desk with ticket resolution. Every service desk is a multi-operational enterprise striving to succeed in multiple categories of the ITIL framework for managed services. Examples include:

• Change management: IT risk management software assists with ITIL change management by allowing your service desk to continuously identify old and outdated technology and evolve your IT infrastructure. Once you’ve replaced old assets, your risk management software can incorporate new items into your database with its automated discovery feature, then continue to monitor risk in your new technology.
• Knowledge management: Risk detection broadens your knowledge base by documenting vulnerabilities in your assets—knowledge which can be used for incident resolution. When you identify the locations with the greatest potential for issues, you can quickly incorporate this information into a top-tier knowledge base.
• Incident and problem management: When your risk management software identifies a risk in a particular asset, you have a leg up on incident and problem management. Risk management software helps you to identify IT assets that may be the root cause of multiple incidents, leading to faster incident-to-problem diagnosis.

Identifying vulnerabilities helps your service desk to link incidents to problems, streamline ticket resolution, and improve customer service by identifying risky assets before they lead to downtime. Aside from these broader benefits of IT risk detection, risk management software offers more specific benefits to help your service desk resolve tickets efficiently and effectively.